The Incredible Drown Case

Mrs. Jackie Metcalf, a 22-year-old Torrance, California, housewife,
mounted the steps of a white one-story building on LaBrea Avenue
in Los Angeles and entered a door marked "Dr. Ruth B. Drown,
Chiropractor." Inside she gave three small pieces of blotting
paper to Doctor Drown and her daughter, Dr. Cynthia Chatfield,
also a chiropractor. The stains on the blotters, Mrs. Metcalf
said, were samples of blood from her three children. She asked
to have her children's ills diagnosed from the blood samples and
paid $50 for each diagnosis. The date was May 23, 1963.

In a few days she hear([ from Doctor Chatfield that analysis
of the blood samples showed the youngsters to be coming down with
chicken pox and mumps. On an earlier visit Mrs. Metcalf had purchased
from Doctor Chatfield a "little black box" -- a $588
Drown Therapeutic Instrument -- to treat herself and her family
at home. Doctor Chatfield told her how to set the dials on the
machine to cure the children.

Mrs. Metcalf, however, was not just another patient -- she
was an undercover agent for the California State Department of
Public Health. Her three children were not ill. And the blood
samples she gave to Doctors Drown and Chatfield were not her children's
blood -- they were the blood of a turkey, a sheep, and a pig.

On the basis of Mrs. Metcalf's experience and other evidence,
Los Angeles deputy district attorney John W. Miner and a squad
of police and public health inspectors swooped down on the LaBrea
Avenue building, arrested Doctors Drown and Chatfield and all
assistant, Mrs. Margaret Lunness, and took into custody enough
Alice-in-Wonderland machines to fill a wing of the Smithsonian
Institution. Doctor Drown died in 1965 while awaiting trial. Doctor
Chatfield and Mrs. Lunness were convicted of grand theft for their
part of the operation and in 1967 were sentenced -- Mrs. Lunness
being placed oil probation for three years and Doctor Chatfield
receiving an indeterminate prison term. They are appealing the
conviction.

The case is a vivid reminder that pseudo-scientific health
quackery is still a major activity in the United States. At the
time of their arrest, Doctors Drown and Chatfield had treated
35,000 persons from all over the country, and had sold their devices
to other fringe practitioners who had treated an unknown number
of other patients. The devices allegedly could diagnose and cure
nearly every known affliction from jealousy to cancer, plus a
few ailments -- which medical science has yet to discover. Actually,
expert witnesses testified that the elaborate machines that form
the basis of the Drown treatment are a hoax. In finding the defendants
guilty, the judge stated that the theory of the treatment is no
more valid than "voodoo or witchcraft."

Ruth Drown got some of her ideas from Dr. Albert Abrams, king
of 20th century gadget quacks, who died in 1924 after having made
millions leasing his machines and treating patients with them.
According to the Abrams "theory," which he called ERA,
all parts of the body vibrate and emit electrical impulses of
different, ascertainable frequencies, What's more, he maintained,
diseased organs emit impulses of different frequencies from healthy
ones. To diagnose illness he "tuned in" the patient's
blood specimen on an Abrams ERA machine, noting where abnormal
vibrations were occurring and pretended to pinpoint the nature
of the illness from the rate of vibration. The "cure"
consisted allegedly feeding proper vibrations into the body with
another Abrams machine, thus overcoming the improper ones.

The American Medical Association's Department of Investigation
has estimated that the Abrams contraptions inspired at least 50
imitations. In state and federal legal actions against such devices,
experts repeatedly testified that both the machines and the theory
behind them are sheer nonsense. This did not deter Ruth Drown,
who took the old master's notions and added many colorful and
imaginative twists of her own.

At Drown Laboratories a patient was told to sit beside an impressive
console and put his feet on two footpads made of German silver.
The console had nine knobs arranged in three rows of three, and
each knob had settings numbered from zero through 10, On the console
panel there was also a micro-ammeter. Near the right-hand corner
of the desk on which the console was mounted was a small rectangular
rubber membrane clamped down by a metal frame. Next to this was
a cylindrical well about an inch and a half deep.

Seated at the console, Doctor Drown placed an electrode on
some portion of the patient's body, Usually his abdomen. This
immediately caused a movement of the needle on the ammeter. With
her right middle finger, on which she wore a rubber covering,
Doctor Drown then stroked the rubber membrane while making adjustments
on the nine dials with her left hand. When her finger began to
"stick" or squeak on the rubber, this indicated that
the dial settings were beginning to approach the vibration rate
of the part or organ of the body that she was supposedly testing.

Next she would open a drawer of her desk and draw forth a number
of sealed glass vials, each containing a different chemical. These
she would insert, unopened, into the well in the desk, one by
one, while continuing to make delicate adjustments on the dials.
By this means she supposedly arrived at the exact vibration rate.
She would then read off the numbers at which the dials were set,
beginning with the upper left dial and proceeding horizontally
across the three rows to the lower right. This composite number,
taken down by an assistant on a large chart, represented the vibration
rate of the illness, which could be looked up in an immense "rate
book."

The "rate book" also indicated the "normal"
vibration rate to be fed back into the body to restore health.
In treatment, the patient lay down in a small cubicle in the Drown
Laboratories, placing his feet against footpads, and applied an
electrode to the area designated by Doctor Drown. Wires led from
the footpads and the electrode to a Drown treatment machine in
another room, which was essentially the same as a diagnostic machine
except that it had no rubber plate. The nine dials of the treatment
machine were set to the numbers indicated in the rate book and
the patient supposedly received healing vibrations of just the
right frequency.

Another Drown treatment device was a tremendous hollow coil
into which the patient, lying on a slab, was bodily inserted.
"All we know about it," Doctor Drown told investigators,
"is that a coil with a charge in it seems to straighten up
people who walk lopsided." State officials who impounded
the device at the time of the arrests promptly dubbed it "The
Tunnel of Love."

If a patient wished to do so he could buy a nine-dial treatment
machine for home use. After being, diagnosed at the Laboratory
the patient would be told, often over the phone, where to set
the dials for regular treatment sessions at home.

Even this, however, was only tile beginning. If a patient didn't
want to bother being hooked up to a machine, either for diagnosis
or treatment, either at the Laboratories or at home, he didn't
need to. Doctors Drown and Chatfield kept dried specimens of each
patient's blood on pieces of blotting paper. If it patient felt
ill he could call Drown Laboratories, and the blood sample, instead
of the patient, would be hooked up to the diagnostic machine.
The blood sample supposedly remained in some kind of continuous
communication with the rest of the patient's blood, wherever he
might be, and thus reflected any current illness.

Treatment, like diagnosis, could also be "indirect."
For $35 a month, Drown Laboratories would insert the patient's
blood specimen into a treatment machine at a specified time each
day, set the dials to the indicated healing rate, and broadcast
an hour's worth of treatment to the patient, which would supposedly
reach him anywhere on the face of the earth.

Ruth Drown also claimed her machines could take photographs
of the diseased organs of patients, wherever the patients were.
She called the process "radio-vision." Several such
photographs were exhibited at the trial, including, one allegedly
taken by a Drown machine in London showing a blood clot and cancer
in a patient in Connecticut. One medical expert called it "completely
unintelligible." Another said that it looked to him like
a Rorschach inkblot.

In a University of Chicago demonstration similar photos were
produced merely by exposing photographic plates to light momentarily.

Doctor Drown had lots of other ideas. One of them was that
jazz music was a cause of cancer. Cancer caused by jazz, she said,
could be dissipated by playing such soothing tunes as Carrie Jacobs
Bond's "Perfect Day."

She also said that each human body is surrounded by a magnetic
field, and that people should be taught how to care for their
magnetic fields properly. One of her publications, the Drown
Atlas of Radio Therapy, says:

Any patient who is weak and depleted should never take shower
baths and stand in the water over the drain, because the patient's
magnetism is washed down with the water through the drain, leaving
him depleted.

Also, a weak patient, after having had a tub bath, should
leave the tub and have someone else drain the water and clean
the tub. If it is necessary to do this himself, he should leave
the tub and put on a robe before starting to drain the tub. Too
many people sit in the tub and drain the water while finishing
the bath, and their own magnetism is sucked away through the
drain pipes to the ground, leaving the patient with that much
less reserve.

As early as 1949, the Drown devices had been shown completely
incapable of diagnosing illness. At a University of Chicago experiment
Doctor Drown was supplied with blood samples of a number of persons
and asked to diagnose their conditions. In one case, after working
over her dials for an hour, she announced that the patient had
cancer of the left breast which had spread to the ovaries uterus,
pancreas, gall bladder, spleen, and kidney; that she was blind
in her right eye; that her ovaries were not functioning properly;
and that there was reduced function of various organs including
the stomach, spinal nerves, and heart. Actually, the patient was
suffering from tuberculosis of the upper lobe of the right lung.

In 1951 Doctor Drown was tried on federal charges of introducing
a misbranded device into interstate commerce. At the trial one
of the government's expert witnesses, Dr. Elmer Belt, described
tile Drown device as "perfectly useless." "You
just do not seem to think much of the instrument, do you, Doctor
Belt?" the defense attorney asked. "I couldn't even
use it to amuse the children," Doctor Belt replied. Doctor
Drown was found guilty by the jury and was fined $1000. She stopped
shipping her devices across state lines but otherwise carried
on business as usual.

In 1966 Doctor Chatfield and Mrs. Lunness went to trial in
Los Angeles on the state charges. In addition to receiving Mrs.
Jackie Metcalf's firsthand account the court heard a procession
of witnesses relate astounding stories. One testified that Doctor
Drown assured him that his son, a diabetic, could reduce his intake
of insulin, prescribed by a doctor, if lie took the Drown treatment.
Another witness, an epileptic, was told by Doctor Drown that she
could cure him; she said that he would be able to stop taking
the drug diplenylhydantoin prescribed by his physician, and she
continued to treat him even after he had a severe seizure in her
office. In another case, a chiropractor who used Drown therapy
instruments on her patients brought a man to Drown Laboratories
who had polyps in his lower intestinal tract. A diagnosis by Drown
instruments showed no cancer, and the chiropractor therefore continued
to treat the supposedly benign polyps with a Drown therapy device.
The patient worsened and died. A biopsy, done by a medical doctor,
had shown the growths were malignant.

A dramatic highlight of the trial was the testimony of Dr.
Moses A. Greenfield, professor of radiology at the UCLA School
of 'Medicine and a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission.
Disassembling a Drown device in open court, Doctor Greenfield
explained that all it basically consisted of was a length of wire
linking together two pieces of dissimilar metal -- the German
silver of the foot pads and the lead of the electrode. The only
function performed by the patient was to complete the otherwise
broken circuit. With the circuit complete, a small electric current
flowed between the two metals, which registered on the ammeter
on the console. The entire device therefore operated like a simple
flashlight battery. It was even possible to eliminate the patient
entirely. Doctor Greenfield demonstrated that the same deflection
of the ammeter needle could be produced by dipping the footpad
and electrode into a dish of water instead of applying them to
a human body.

As for the nine dials with their 10 numbered settings, Doctor
Greenfield dismounted the panel and showed that only two wires
each dial to the circuit. Further dismantling showed that the
10 positions of each switch were connected together and it therefore
made no difference on which position any of the dials were set!

The exposure of the scientific fraud brought some moments of
amusement to the courtroom. But behind it lay all epic example
of heartlessness. cruelty, and indifference to human life. "Quackery
can kill," said deputy district attorney John Miner in his
summary, "and the use of fraudulent instruments such as these
devices in the courtroom is dangerous to human life." The
Drown-Chatfield scheme, which treated thousands of patients and
took in immense sums of money for years after its worthlessness
had been demonstrated in the Chicago experiments and the federal
trial, demonstrates that the nation is still far from solving,
one of its gravest social problems -- the menace of health fraud.

___________________

This article originally appeared in the April 1968 issue of
Today's Health, a magazine published by the American Medical
Association. During the 1960s and 1970s, the author investigated
and wrote about many quackery-related topics. After that, he taught
communications at Howard University and developed a writing and
editing service, which he still operates today.